This was neither of these.
The trauma bay was bustling with people by the time we arrived: nurses, my favorite orthopedics resident, an older man I recognized as one of the pediatric Emergency Department attendings. For some reason, the tone seemed somber; all the previous traumas had felt like an interdisciplinary happy hour. In the corner, one of the nurses spoke into a radio and a staticky voice responded. With a world-weary sigh, Shruti turned to me.
“Hey,” she said. “So. The patient who’s coming in is a fifteen-year-old. Gunshot to the head. It’s going to be messy, and there’s going to be a lot of bodies in here. Normally, I like for you to be involved, but I think for this one, try to make space.”
Gunshot to the head. Fifteen. I had hardly processed her words when the bustle picked up again. The ambulance transporting the patient had arrived. Shruti sprang into action, snatching back boards and then jumping on the computer to put in orders they would need; from far away I could see the words massive transfusion protocol and CT Head on the screen, and then he was here.
I felt like I was in a fishbowl. The boy on the stretcher looked like one of my younger cousins, except his face . . . his poor face. I couldn’t look at him any longer, so I looked at everything else, at the cervical collar placed uselessly around his neck, at the scraps of cut-away clothing that flapped under him. At the rest of his body, splashed with blood, but otherwise pristine and untouched by the violence that had been done to his face; a lithe body, he was only fifteen, he probably played sports, maybe ran track and field for his school—
Someone pulled me bodily out of the trauma bay. A cup of water was shoved into my hands, and a gentle but firm missive to go home whispered in my ear. Instead, I stared blankly through the glass. The boy was obscured from view by the hustling bodies. They had started compressions. Shruti’s voice firmly but calmly called out orders from the foot of the bed. A passing nurse muttered that the kid was pretty much already dead, and had anyone called his family? I imagined his mother. She was probably the kind of woman who would call me honey in the grocery store. Did she know what had happened to her son? Or was she sitting at home completely unaware, rewatching her favorite episode of Scandal and not thinking to check on her teenager before curfew? Would she pick up the phone when we called, or ignore it to finish the episode? What sound would she make when she heard the news?
I didn’t have to wonder long. Behind me, a high, keening scream punctured the air, and when I turned around, I saw her. She was younger than I had pictured, and heavier, but even from this distance I could see the resemblance. The police officers who had escorted the ambulance to the hospital formed a wall with their bodies around her, blocking her from rushing in and interrupting the code, and she shoved against them, her screams devolving into heart-wrenching sobs.
“Do you know what happened, ma’am?” one of them asked her. “Was he involved in anything he shouldn’t have been?”
I felt sick. How dare he ask her a question like that while her son clung to life by a thread only a few feet away? Would that question save him? Would it give him back his face? Shaking with fury, I walked back to the workroom and silently gathered my belongings. I remembered the young man from the Emergency Department so many years ago, brushed off as an addict even as his abdomen filled with blood. For both this boy and that man, the message was implicit—whatever suffering they were enduring, they must have deserved it.
The bright colors of the children’s hospital took on a dim, sinister edge in the evening light, the chalky round eyes of the children in the third-floor mural becoming dark and bottomless. I sat down on one of the couches in the lobby, leaned my head back against the headrest, and closed my eyes. Home was only a fifteen-minute walk away. I’d been doing that walk for two and a half years, but right now, going into the vast openness of the night felt daunting. I inhaled. Just downstairs, a boy was dying. He had been full of potential, full of a future that had likely now been extinguished. I exhaled.
I wasn’t familiar with death. Being an ocean away from most of our relatives meant that the passing of a family member was something Tabatha and I experienced only in abstract. We even looked forward to funerals, excited for the freedom we could enjoy when our parents traveled back to the motherland to pay their respects.* In tenth grade, when my great-aunt Gifty died, I had nodded passively as my father flipped through photographs of her walking through the market with me wrapped onto her back. It was as if he wanted the images to trigger a memory of her, hoping to inspire in me even a sliver of the loss that he felt. After all, Great-Aunt Gifty had been his second mother. She had helped pay his school fees and housed him in her small London flat when he first moved there for pharmacy school, cooking for him, cleaning up after him, and asking for nothing in return but his gratitude. A true Ashanti woman, she treated my dad like one of her own children.* He flipped through page after page of our old photo albums, trying to imprint her visage into my mind, trying to keep her memory alive within his offspring.